Nicaragua Village Development Project

Our Nicaragua microcredit program is targeted towards Santa Rosa, a village of 70 large families nearly destroyed by Hurricane Mitch in December 1998. 

The village itself was set up in 1984 as a resettlement area during the"Contra War" which Nicaragua fought against US backed guerillas. Having been mostly residents of the border area near Honduras, they were Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and were given just the bare bones needed to survive-a few hundred acres of land well inland from a secondary road, some rudimentary building materials, the most minimal access to water sources, a little food and no monetary support from a government under siege. Subsistence agriculture was Santa Rosa's only means of survival from 1984-1999.

As Operation USA was a major responder to Hurricane Mitch throughout its impact area (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador), we came upon Santa Rosa in the course of working throughout Nicaragua, a country where 20% of its population (over 900,000 people) was affected by Hurricane Mitch. Such widespread devastation required a huge effort by both governmental donors and NGOs in order to restore lives and livelihoods to an environment physically transformed by the storm and resulting floods and which was later affected by a two-year drought.

Our approach in Santa Rosa was to first guarantee the very survival of Santa Rosa's residents by providing them with food, seeds, access to water and medical assistance.  In the years which followed, Operation USA built a village health clinic, a common kitchen, a pre-school, an irrigation system, a micro-hydropower electrical system, a connection to the national power grid, a library, a computer training center, a recreational park and several outbuildings used by the villagers in common to house a series of microcredit projects. 

In addition, Operation USA underwrote the tuition and fees for the village's high school-age students to attend high school in the municipality of San Fernando-which after 3 years of full support was reduced to 50% support and replaced by the villagers' common agricultural plot, whose annual income from watermelon and yucca production now subsidizes these educational expenses. Post high school education in the provincial capitol of Ocotal was also subsidized by Operation USA.

The development of a sustainable village economy was always a focus of Operation USA's programs. Village agriculture in Santa Rosa had earlier consisted of beans and rice, the dietary staple, but was later expanded to include a wide range of commercial fruits and vegetables along with animal husbandry. Hurricane Mitch funds were used to expand the animal husbandry program, including the purchase of essential start-up flocks of rabbits, sheep, pigs, chickens plus their housing, feed and veterinary services. Villagers were trained in animal husbandry, nutritional food preparation and maintenance of water resources. Bio-gas projects supplying the common village kitchen with gas operated stoves were set up in tandem with pig production projects.

Other economic development projects of note included a mural project in which Nicaragua's leading muralist, Julie Aguirre, spent two months painting a mural on the side of the village clinic and training three new artists to assist her. Two of those young artists now sell their paintings in Managua through an art gallery and are among the highest income earners in the village.

Operation USA has also helped the village set up its own NGO, Santa Rosa Unida, to better administer rural credit programs, govern the village and plan for the day when Santa Rosa attains total self-sufficiency and can share its skills with neighboring villages in need of support.

The Santa Rosa project helped us better understand total village development which we are now using in Sri Lanka in a similarly-sized village to help its recovery from the 2004 Asian Tsunami.